


Answering Death

by ladyeternal



Category: Suits (TV)
Genre: BDSM, BDSM Scene, Episode 2x09, Grieving!Mike, M/M, episode coda, reference to canon character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-06
Updated: 2014-06-06
Packaged: 2018-02-03 14:20:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1747694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyeternal/pseuds/ladyeternal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For all humans, there is an instinctive need to answer death with life.  For Mike, reeling from the loss of his grandmother, that means only one thing.  And only one person has ever really been able to give it to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Answering Death

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tiptoe39](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiptoe39/gifts).



> Disclaimer: The characters and settings of Suits belong to their respective creators. I own little more than a tabby that gets destructive when he feels ignored and am only playing with these worlds for my own amusement and the free entertainment of others.
> 
> Spoilers: To be safe, all aired episodes; specific spoilers for ep 2x9
> 
> As if I don’t have a bazillion other fic commitments buzzing around my head, this popped into my brain after watching Suits ep 2x9 and was promptly Jossed by 2x10. I blame (and by that I mean wrote this for) [tiptoe39](http://archiveofourown.org/users/tiptoe39). Beta’d by [](http://secondplatypus.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://secondplatypus.livejournal.com/)**secondplatypus** , who totally enables me. ♥ you always, BB.
> 
> Also, in my mind, this fic is an AU in which it was the late nights with Harvey that made Jenny suspicious and eventually break it off, and Mike and Harvey hooked up not long afterwards. No drama with Rachel, no new-adulterous-blonde-person-whose-name-I-don’t-recall.
> 
> Feedback is adored, so if you like the fic, please comment! And the more details the better; I love knowing what people like about my work.
> 
> Music: [Leather – Tori Amos](http://lyrics.wikia.com/Tori_Amos:Leather)

~ooooOOOoooo~

 

He didn’t know how he got to the apartment. Color and movement and time had seemed to blur out in the wake of the loss, of grief so unexpected and devastating. Some people, upon seeing him, might have wondered if he was on drugs, others if he was all right.

Harvey knew he was neither. The door was opened before Mike could do more than place a hand on the smooth wood, his beautiful face somber and knowing as he stepped aside to let Mike stumble across the threshold.

There was no compassion in that face. Mike had known there wouldn’t be. Harvey had lost his father while preoccupied by firm business; if Mike were here for sympathy, he’d get a snark-laden earful about how very few people actually get to have the fairy-tale bedside vigils and the whispered last words of love and ‘good-bye’. Mike knew that already from personal experience, and he’d gotten his fill of compassion as he’d wept in Rachel’s arms; heard it in Jessica’s rich voice when he’d called to ask for bereavement time. He wasn’t here looking for compassion.

Harvey knew that, too.

There were no words exchanged as the door closed behind him, Mike coming to stand in the living area without really knowing how his feet kept moving him forward. He felt lost, adrift, alone. He remembered this feeling from the night of his parents’ death, and he hated the way it seemed to envelop him like New England fog, blinding his senses and muffling his shouts for help.

“Mike?” The voice came from behind him. Mike turned to see Harvey standing there, gorgeous even in a well-worn black tee and gray sweat pants and nothing between his feet and the hardwood floors. Mike envied how grounded Harvey always seemed, even in the midst of the recent chaos at the firm.

And then Harvey was near enough to touch, having closed all but an arm’s length of the distance between them while Mike was staring at his recently-cut toenails. He was tipping his head to the side: his “are you in there?” head-tilt. The tilt that he always used when he wasn’t sure if the nonsense coming out of his mouth was the result of Mike not getting enough sleep or just a brief loss of sanity. “Are you sure?”

The question sank through the fog, and Mike responded by unbuttoning his shirt, tugging it free of his slacks and letting it drop to the floor. His undershirt followed, peeled away in a heartbeat and tossed down to lie in a crumpled mess on one end of the puddled silk shirt. He didn’t want to talk. He couldn’t make his brain shut up. He was lost and in pain, and this time he wasn’t an eleven-year-old child whose only option for dealing with loss was talk therapy with grief counselors or his grandmother.

He needed something different, and only Harvey could give it to him.

Harvey nodded and gestured, his expression shifting. Mike turned and walked unerringly into the room the older man had indicated, a room Mike had been in only a few times since this unexpected affair had begun. For most others, it would be a guest room, but Harvey didn’t entertain guests.

Mike finished stripping down once inside, then moved to stand in the center of the room: feet shoulder-width apart, hands clasped behind his back, head up and eyes ahead. Another time, he might be kept waiting this way for upwards of an hour. Now, Harvey followed barely two minutes later, shutting the door and taking in the sight of his naked associate.

Inspection first. Always. Harvey didn’t like putting new marks down until the old ones were healed and gone. There was another element, too: a possessive need to know that the only marks on Mike’s skin were put there by his hand. There was a deep-seated thrill that accompanied the way those eyes traversed his body, cataloguing every detail and taking note of anything that didn’t meet with Harvey Specter’s exacting standards.

Tonight, though: tonight, Harvey didn’t object to Mike’s lack of preparatory shaving. Didn’t remark upon the faint bruise on Mike’s lower left cheek, lingering evidence of a bite that hadn’t yet faded. Mike’s back and thighs were blank canvases, and they would serve. Tonight wasn’t about meeting Harvey’s pleasure.

A snap of his fingers. Mike’s muscles uncoiled and he nearly sprinted to the St. Andrew’s Cross. It was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship: honey-gold oak burnished to satiny smoothness, diagonal cross beams set in a braced frame, with leather shackles for the wrists and ankles that were lined with the softest chamois suede that Mike had ever felt. The bottom points of the cross were open, with boards polished and shaped to support a person’s feet extending from either side; the leather ankle shackles attached to those boards with a slender chain that would likely snap as easily as thread in an emergency. Mike fitted himself to it almost eagerly, feet sliding into place and arms extending up to grip the tops of the cross beams.

Harvey was right behind him, serene and precise as he fitted the shackles around Mike’s limbs and buckled them. The sensation flooded through Mike and he nearly sagged against the center of the cross in relief. He needed this. He needed this so badly…

“Head up.” Calm. Controlled. Mike willingly straightened his neck, giving Harvey easy access to wrap the silken blindfold around his head and tie it off. The gag was next: a muzzle gag that Harvey buckled into place over the blindfold. A deep breath sighed out through Mike’s nose as he felt Harvey step away, leaving him naked and bound and totally vulnerable. He was safe with Harvey. He didn’t have to be afraid here. Harvey would never let anything happen to him when he was like this.

“Can you knock?” A sharp question, a formality that Harvey strictly observed. Much as Mike reveled in the bondage Harvey put him in, much as Mike trusted that Harvey would never hurt him, they were still new to this. Harvey allowed nothing to happen in the playroom unless Mike had a safe signal, even if Mike felt confident that he would never need it.

Obediently, Mike shifted his right hand to release the post, balled his fingers, and rapped his knuckles against the wood three times. It wasn’t a fancy signal, but it was one Harvey had promised to obey instantly. Another reason why Mike had nothing to fear.

“Good. Use it if you need to.” Harvey’s brusque, powerful voice. The voice that asserted authority over everyone in the room without ever being raised. The voice that made lesser men tremble. Mike loved that voice.

The first kiss of the strap across his shoulders almost caught Mike off-guard. He jerked in surprise, but there was no pain. There never was. The doeskin never left a mark and barely stung more than a high-five delivered too hard. His nerves lit up in its wake like the lights at Rockefeller Centre, and each precision stroke Harvey laid across his skin set off more endorphins, drove away more of the pain, quieted more of his riotous thoughts. There was only the strangely warm wood beneath his palms and the soles of his feet. Only the not-quite-slap of leather against his back.

And Harvey, taking control the way he did so naturally. The way Mike needed.

How much time had passed, Mike didn’t know or care. The warm-ups never seemed to last the same amount of time; Harvey never changed implements until he judged Mike to be in the right headspace. But the sharp bite of Harvey’s bull-hide flogger seared across Mike’s senses, shoving a cry up into his throat and snapping his head back. It lolled forward again, his shoulders opening up for the second lash, and the third; again and again, each falling faster than the one before. Warmth suffused him with every well-placed stroke, letting his mind disconnect and the constant flow of information in it fall silent.

This was a high he couldn’t get from drugs. Nothing he’d ever tried could silence his mind the way this could, with his control given freely and Harvey at the other end of the lash. He could feel the blood in his veins, a throb with every heartbeat, a metronome to time the way Harvey slowed, then built the tempo back up.

The pain was starting to be noticeable through the haze, but it was a good pain, a real pain, a pain that could be healed with cool cloths and a salve made from wild yam that he swore in his lucid state Harvey only knew about because of **_[The Replacements](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Replacements_\(film\))_**. It wasn’t like the pain of losing his parents, or his grandmother. It wasn’t like the pain of his entire life spiraling out of control because of some stunt Trevor convinced him to pull, the limitless possibilities everyone had always said he’d had suddenly drying up like water spilled from a cup in Death Valley.

Behind him, Harvey slowed, silently gauging him. Mike was drunk on endorphins, deep in submission. The tails of the flogger bit into him one last time, then fell away, and Mike’s body seemed to pulse in anticipation of the next touch, surely the touch of Harvey’s hands…

Until there was a whisper and a crack behind him breaking the silence. A moment later, a fierce blaze striped across Mike’s back: the wake of the first strike from Harvey’s kangaroo whip. Once again, the older man let his strokes fall with increasing speed, this time putting more force behind the lashes he rained across Mike’s now bright red back.

Mike hadn’t expected this. Harvey had never pushed him this far before, never whipped him for the sake of the whipping. It was always a prelude, always foreplay, until Mike was so sensitive across his back and buttocks and thighs that he could practically climax from a measured glide of Harvey’s hand. He needed that: needed Harvey buried deep and pistoning harder with every thrust until they were both shaking and sticky with saline and Mike had to be carried to bed.

But now Harvey was laying out sharp, solid blows of the whip, each one sparking a new rivulet of hot pain until Mike was sure his body was on fire. He wouldn’t be bleeding; Harvey deplored blood on his toys; but the bright edge of the pain layered over the intoxicating pleasure shattered the last of Mike’s filters. Harvey was demanding his submission, commanding without words that Mike give everything up to him.

_“…hardass.”_

The word floated up through the haze, and with it a white-hot knife of pain that outstripped anything the whip could cause. For every stroke that followed, pain within answered pain without, until Mike was screaming out his impotence under Harvey’s lash, the kiss of leather drawing out a bone-wrenching catharsis that left him wrung out and sagging against his restraints.

Only then did Harvey slow to a stop, the whip slithering down Mike’s skin in a serpentine caress. Mike floated, dazed and trembling as Harvey stepped close, his body pressing up against Mike’s. He’d removed his own shirt, his naked chest feeling almost cool against the inflamed skin of Mike’s own back, and it drove a mewling cry from the younger man as the shock of contact washed through him.

Last on, first off: Harvey’s slender fingers were gentle as he removed the muzzle gag, the blindfold, the ankle shackles and then the wrist. He wouldn’t even allow Mike to try to move, scooping up his young lover instead and carrying him to the bedroom.

* * *

How long Mike stayed down, he couldn’t have said. He might even have fallen asleep somewhere in the midst of coming up from his subspace. All he knew when the comforting buzz finally ebbed away was that he was lying on his stomach, his back dressed in cool salve and the sheet draped casually across his hips, while Harvey lay on his side beside him.

“You in there?” Harvey’s voice was soft this time, gentle in a way Mike had never heard until the first time they’d played like this. As vulnerable as Mike ever was in bondage, Harvey was even more so after the scene was over. It was a precious gift that Harvey had given him: a trust that Mike would never betray.

“She knew,” Mike murmured. His tongue felt thick, and he wondered if his speech was slurred from the residual endorphin high. He could still feel the traces of it in his limbs, despite the lassitude that always came over him after a scene. “About this, I mean. Us.”

Harvey’s eyes widened just slightly, and one hand slid up from where it had been resting on Mike’s shoulder to brush gently through his hair. “I liked her,” he offered quietly.

Mike closed his eyes against that, willing fresh tears not to form. He didn’t want to cry over this like he had over his parents; didn’t want to be that broken-hearted child anymore. “Does it ever get easier?” he asked, a sob threatening to close his throat around the words.

Soft, deft fingers never wavered, tracing comforting lines along the edges of his face and through his hair. “You’re not alone, Mike,” Harvey answered, an edge to his voice that betrayed the strength of his own grief for his father, refreshed by the parallel of Mike’s recent loss. “You weren’t then, and you’re not now.”

It wasn’t the answer he wanted, but it was the answer he needed. Mike nodded, swallowing back against the renewed threat of tears, and left his eyes closed. Harvey was right: he wasn’t alone.

There was still the niggling voice at the back of his mind: the persistent whisper that he owed Harvey a long, hard fuck in exchange for that beautiful whipping, that he’d come here in response to the primal need all humans have to answer death with life. If Harvey sensed it, he didn’t speak to it directly, trailing his fingers along the axis of Mike’s shoulders above the salve instead. It sparked a fresh wave of heat, drawing out a tiny moan from Mike as he stretched down into the mattress like a cat being petted.

“Later,” Harvey promised. “Just rest for now.”

Sighing, Mike nodded and inched closer to the warmth of his lover. Outside the door of this apartment, there was a funeral to arrange, final bills to pay, an apartment to make a decision about and a firm in the midst of a coup that could cost both of them their careers. But the things outside that door could keep until tomorrow.

For now, the bed was warm and soft. There would be sex, and food, and quiet words. Harvey was beside him, and that was all Mike really needed.


End file.
